CHAP. VI The Domestic Life of Animals 107 



impatient, till at length their last encumbrance — their 

 "ghost," as naturalists call it — is thrown off. Now the 

 other life, the life of love, begins. Merrily they dance up 

 and down, dimpling the smooth water into smiling with a 

 touch — chasing, embracing, separating. See the filmy fairy 

 wings, the large lustrous eyes of the males, the tail fila- 

 ments gracefully sweeping in the dance ! They never 

 pause to eat — they could not if they tried ; hunger is past, 

 love is present, and in the near future is death. The 

 evening shadows grow longer, — shadows of death to the 

 Ephemerides. The trout jump at them, a few rain-drops 

 thin the throng, the stream bears others away. The 

 mothers lay their eggs in the water, and wearily die forth- 

 with — cradle and tomb are side by side ; the males seem 

 to pass in a sigh from the climax of loving to the other 

 crisis of dying. But the eggs are in the water, and 

 the dance of love is more than a dance of death. 

 Turning homewards, we cannot but think sadly of other 

 Ephemerides, of patient larval life, of the gradual 

 revealing of the higher self, of shrouds thrown aside and 

 wedding robes put on, of hunger eaten up by love, of the 

 sacrifice of maternity, of cradle and tomb together. Yet 

 we remember the eggs in the water, the promise of the 

 future beneath the surface of the stream. Under the horse- 

 chestnut tree, too, the wind has blown the shed petals like 

 white foam, but the tree itself is strong like Ygdrasil, and 

 among the branches a bird sings in the twilight. 



Returning in more matter-of-fact mood to parental care, 

 we need not dwell upon those cases where the young 

 are simply sheltered for a while about the body of the 

 mother, hanging to a jellyfish, on some sea-urchins hidden 

 in tents of spines, in one or two sea-cucumbers half buried 

 in the skin, adhering to the naked ventral surface of the 

 common little leech {Clepsine), imprisoned in modified 

 tentacles in some marine worms, carried about in a dorsal 

 brood-chamber in many water-fleas, or under the curved 

 tail of higher crustaceans, retained within the gills of 

 bivalves, and so on. Such adaptations are interesting, 

 they involve prolonged physical contact between mother 



